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From: mjr@welch.jhu.edu (Marcus J. Ranum)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Memory Protection
Message-ID: <1989Nov4.031121.5495@welch.jhu.edu>
Date: 4 Nov 89 03:11:21 GMT
References: <37410@srcsip.UUCP> <8911040008.AA13445@en.ecn.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: mjr@welchlab.welch.jhu.edu (Marcus J. Ranum)
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In article <8911040008.AA13445@en.ecn.purdue.edu> bevis@EE.ECN.PURDUE.EDU (Jeff Bevis) writes:
>system crashes as we do.  But what are we running here?  We don't have a
>hundred users online at once who'd be mortified when the machine went down;
>This is a single-user machine. [...]

	That's true, but it IS a multitasking machine. If you can't rely
on the machine not to crash while you do real work (like compiling code
and testing it) then you can't rely on it to be doing anything else at the
same time. That gives away 8/10 of the usefulness of multitasking and if
you're going to follow that kind of logic, why multitask at all ? On my
Sun, I like to edit several source modules at once, while compiling and
debugging in another window. If I knew I was going to have to redo my
edits each time I wrote bad code (I did, once, in 1986, I think it was :-) )
I'd never be able to do that, and then what is the use of multitasking ?

	I got really beefed when I would be downloading files in the 
background on my Amy, and have to restart a 500K download because some
package didn't get all the memory it wanted. 

	Let's get real, here. The computer is better suited for doing
the scut work like memory management - and a damn sight more patient -
than I am - so why should I have to waste what little brains I got to
do it's job ? That's what I bought the computer FOR !

--mjr();

-- 
	He was in his room half awake, half asleep. The walls of the room
seemed to alter angles, elongating and shrinking alternately, then twisting
around completely so that he was in the opposite side of the room.
	"A trick of the light and too much caffeine," he thought.    -Bauhaus